Real Steel Trailer

Real Steel

In the near-future, Charlie Kenton is a washed-up fighter who retired from the ring when robots took over the sport. After Charlie's robot is trashed, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max to rebuild and train an unlikely contender.

Lisa Schwarzbaum

Real Steel is directed by "Night at the Museum's" Shawn Levy, who makes good use of his specialized skill in blending people and computer-made imaginary things into one lively, emotionally satisfying story.

Randy Cordova

There's a little "Kramer vs. Kramer" here, a dash of "Transformers" there, and it's all topped with big heap of "Rocky." But it's hard to argue with the results, because, at times, Real Steal is close to a knockout.

Wesley Morris

Carrie Rickey

It is earsplitting, crowd-pleasing, and, no doubt, 'bot-pleasing, too. If you told me I would get emotionally and viscerally involved in two machines punching the hard drives out of each other, I would tell you you were crazy. I would be wrong.

James Berardinelli

Roger Ebert

Real Steel is a real movie. It has characters, it matters who they are, it makes sense of its action, it has a compelling plot. This is the sort of movie, I suspect, young viewers went to the "Transformers" movies looking for.

Rex Reed

Stephanie Zacharek

It goes through all the motions, properly and efficiently, and yet it's missing some core warmth. Watching Real Steel, I kept thinking of Brad Bird's retro-modern cartoon "The Iron Giant," and of how that picture humanized a metal alien so effortlessly.

Nick Schager

James White

Rocky with robots? It's not quite in Balboa's weight class, but Real Steel at least has some heft. There's barely a story beat among the beat-downs that you won't expect, and sometimes the saccharine gets in the way of the spectacle, but on the whole this is enjoyable family entertainment.

Forrest Wickman

When I was 7 and saw "Over The Top," I saw no irony in its moniker, even during a slow-motion close-up of two battling hands. While Real Steel is similarly ludicrous, I predict it will play like a masterpiece with 7-year-olds.

Betsy Sharkey

Nick Pinkerton

Based very loosely on a short story by "I Am Legend" author Richard Matheson, Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: "Paper Moon" or "Over the Top," say.

Joshua Rothkopf

Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie's special effects are seamless and far more cleanly cut than any of Michael Bay's hash. But the element that lingers longest is a subtle strand - also woven into last week's "Take Shelter" - of recessionary anxiety.

Steve Persall

Mary Pols

The story remains sadly mired in botdom, which leads to some boredom. It's hard to look away from the ever-dazzling Jackman, but the sight of him hunched over the controls of something akin to a live action video game is not, in the end, much more exciting than the sight of your average teenager hunched over the controls of a Game Boy.

Staff [Not Credited]

Stephen Holden

An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.

Roger Moore

Todd McCarthy

This punishingly predictable tale will test whether sci-fi action fanboys can stomach having their cherished genre infiltrated by sentimental hokum about a down-on-his-luck dad and his spunky long-lost son.

Joe Neumaier

In either a stunningly brave or misguided act of meta-absurdity, Real Steel, which is about a boy, his dad and the robot that changes their lives, actually feels as if it were made inside the mind of a kid obsessed with robots.

Kyle Smith

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?